Click here for Full Issue of EIR Volume 9, Number 43, November 9, 1982
The Club of Munich: a nasty little tool
of the oligarchs of the southern tier
by Laurent Murawiec
"Where money is, you will find big names too," Zurich's
leading weekly paper Die Weltwoche wrote-that journal is
in charge of saying "amen" when the money leaves the room.
On Sept. 44 in Munich, the former capital of the Bavarian
kingdom, a throng of elite aristocrats and financiers was
congregating at what was described as "the workshop of the
rich, the shop where higher yields are prepared, the VIP
lounge for the jet set," in a word, Munich's brand-new "Fi­
nance Club."
And there they were, these creatures let out of their family
vaults and crypts, the names which have left trails of blood,
famine, and poverty in European history: Prince Fugger­
Babenhausen, whose ancestors, the Augsburg bankers,
bankrolled imperial Spain's looting of South America and
the extermination of its native population; Prince Thurn und
Taxis, whose family ran Venice's intelligence services, the
world's best and deadliest, for several centuries, and whose
family fortune is counted in billions of dollars; Franz von
Bayern, of the Royal Family of Wittelsbach, which ruled that
south German province for one thousand years-until 1918.
membership fee of 2,250 marks ($lOOO)-a series of ser­
vices: computer and screen-display access to a great number
of economic-financial data banks and monitor services, as
well as media and other sources of information. Plugging his
personal chip into the computer terminal, the member can
use the data and the programs to model his own investment
strategy, calculate the returns, vary the options, etc., i.e.,
play with electronic gadgetry and fill the role usually played
by his investment adviser, the bank.
Were the finance club only that, it would barely deserve
one paragraph. But, summing up the advice provided through
the courtesy of several Munich-based financial experts, the
chief stock-exchange operator of one of the city's old private
banks said, "We won't touch it with a six-foot pole. The
reputation of some of those associated with it is, let me say,
dubious. There's not one pro interested. We presume it'll be
a fiasco."
This manager's healthy views, however, remain too much
Finance Club of Munich
at ground level; a scrutiny of the public and less well-known
sponsors would change his views.
Running the Club is one Wolfgang Schoeller, an expert
at designing tax shelters in the jungle of real-estate markets.
A Munich financial insider described him as "a specialist in
the grey capital markets, in operations that would not be
transacted above the counter of a bank, without being nec­
essarily totally black, but rather grey, just adventurous."
Schoeller received his training in the 1950s as financial
assistant to Richard Muenemann, the most celebrated finan­
cial swindler of the German post-war period. Muenemann
owned the infamous Investitions- und Handelsbank (IHB) of
Frankfurt, a bank that triggered a gigantic 1952-53 scandal
for fraud on Jewish reparations money; Muenemann's own
collapse, bankruptcy and flight out of Germany in 1963; and
the purchase of IHB by Walter Hesselbach. Hesselbach was
Located in one of Munich's posh areas, the club offers
its members (at present about 150)--who pay an annual
himself a dubious financial czar of the German trade unions
who re-sold a bank whose books had been carefully cooked
The princes had brought their hired pens with them, such
as Henri Nannen, chief editor of Stern magazine, a former
member of Mr. Goebbels' wartime staff; and their house
servants, such as one Mr. Strachwitz, of the Wittelsbacher
Vermogensverwaltung (Property Management).
Especially imported from America for the club's opening
celebration was Alexander Haig, whose topless quality was
referred to with respect to what is above his shoulders. The
club's plush quarters and their awesome contents of com­
puters and oligarchs thus enjoyed a spectacular, much-pub­
licized startup with the benediction of Mr. Haig, who is a
lower-level asset of the Italo-German Freemasonic cults.
ElK
November 9, 1982
Economics
© 1982 EIR News Service Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited.
11
to the business partners of Tibor Rosenbaum (of Banque de
Credit International of Geneva, and the notorious Investors'
Overseas Service, lOS): the Hessische Landesbank of Frank­
furt, Germany's sixth largest bank, which nearly went bank­
rupt as a result.
After Muenemann's discomfiture, Schoeller-who had
escaped the sad fate of his boss-completed his apprentice­
ship by joining Bernie Cornfeld's lOS, the world's largest
drug- and dirty-money-laundering machine. Its German
branch was run by politico Erich Mende-the embodiment
of continuity between the Nazi liberals of Hjalmar Schacht,
and the modem liberal party-and banker August von Finck,
of the all-important Merck, Finck private banking house of
Munich, one of the individuals who own and run the Allianz
insurance group. Allianz is the Central European represent­
ative of Venice's Assicurazione Generali, the largest land­
owner in Munich and a crucial control-point for the oligar­
chy's financial operations in Germany.
After lOS had gone the way of Muenemann, Schoeller,
whose choice of sponsors obviously already formed a pat­
tern, set up his own (small) shop in the real-estate advisory
business-supermarket ventures and the like. No big fish,
Schoeller's annual known turnover does not exceed 50-60
million marks.
How has this twilight-zone financier been able to bring
together the millions of marks required to get the Club started?
How to make friends
The Westdeutsche Landesbank provided loans for the
venture-a decision that might be explained in terms of that
bank's immoderate taste for loss-making propositions, a pro­
clivity that has marked both the bank's vertiginous expansion
under its former chief, Ludwig Poullain. Poullain had to step
down after shady loan affairs were unearthed (the Poullain­
Schoeller link already existed)-along with the above-aver­
age loan losses suffered by the Dusseldorf-based bank. But
the West LB, as it is known, is not a shareholder in the
Finance Club partnership, just a lender of funds.
While names of the silent partners are not publicly known,
some educated guess can be ventured.
To start with basics, the Maria-Theresastrasse of Munich,
number 26, houses not only Schoeller Aktiengesellschaft on
the first floor, but also Schoeller's private apartments above,
and, on the penthouse, those of Schoeller's "close friend,"
Peter von Siemens.
Friends like Siemens
Before laying out a few facts about the latter, one of
Schoeller AG's main partners should not be forgotten: it is
Caismir, Furst von und zu Liechtenstein-from the ruling
family of that barbaric, feudal relic of a principality that
houses a huge chunk of Europe's dirty-money operations.
Even Swiss bankers blush when they think of goings-on
there.
12
Economics
Herr von Siemens is the family dean of the dynasty that
was developed by British intelligence as their German-based
asset in telecommunication technologies, and is at present a
curious pseudo-industrial organization: The so-called "Ab­
teilung Z" (Department Z), controlled with an iron fist by the
Siemens family, handles finances, long-term planning, po­
litical and educational activities-while a series of vertically­
organized divisions are, in their own right, industrial corpo­
rations. There are very limited links between the horizontal,
control-layer CZ") and the other divisions. Peter von Sie­
mens, one of the most ubiquitous presences in the boardrooms
of German corporations and banks, is also the chairman of
the "Society of the Friends of Bayreuth," the Nazi-loving
Wagner cult organization.
True to form and family, von Siemens is also the financier
for the Carl-Friedrich Siemens Foundation, the center-point
for the articulation and propagation into European elites of
the Nazi, neo-Nazi and post-Nazi ideologies. The foundation
is run at present by former Waffen SS volunteer Armin Moh­
ler, the herald of the so-called conservative revolution.
Herr von Siemens is not Schoeller's only friend. Who
brought in such a prominent figure as Alexander Haig at
Schoeller's club's opening? Munich sources report three
names: Rolf Rodenstock, a Munich industrialist who doubles
as Chairman of the German Industry Confederation (BDI);
Ludwig Huber, the chairman of the board of the Bayerische
Landesbank (a key channel of Wittelsbach royal power and
money) who is a close friend of neo-conservative Franz-Josef
Strauss; and August von Finck, Jr.-full circle, it seems,
from humble lOS beginnings.
The power shift
The Weltwoche, indeed, was right: many names and much
money-to what end?
As the Bavarian metropolis's financiers are wont to ex­
plain, with depression wiping out the economic base of the
traditional Rhine-Ruhr and Rhine-Main industrial areas, the
"southern tier" of German business, the Munich-through­
Stuttgart belt, with its "soft" technology base, is gaining
dominance. And the banks associated with the old, collaps­
ing heavy industries, are being fatally wounded by the de­
industrialization.
But the post-industrial activities promote the fortunes of
other banks-and power is shifting from the old Prussian­
Rhinelander axis to the southern tier-which has also scored
an impressive political breakthrough recently in the Kohl
cabinet (see EIR. Oct. 26). Representing a new, important
operational and intelligence capability, the new Finance Club,
that uncanny mix of twilight zone and aristocrats (not so
weird, if one recalls that the Princess of Thurn und Taxis was
recently caught by overzealous custom officers with a large
chunk of hashish in her handbag), is part of the new apparatus
now emerging to consolidate the financial and political take­
over of Germany by the southern-tier oligarchical mafia.
EIR
November 9, 1982